Bonus Late-Night Post

My mom just arrived home after visiting family and friends in California for three weeks. She brought home this huge bag of stuff she must have gotten from my grandpa, tons of old letters and documents and photographs. I love looking at old pictures; there was a photo album where I could see his personality coming through in the captions, and it made the people in them seem really...real. I've only ever seen the same two pictures of my grandma who died long before I was born (when she was about 35), and here was a whole album of her. There were also a bunch of army documents, a marriage certificate and--get this--stories.

My grandma wrote. There were pages of notes on plot lines and characters, and a bunch of manuscripts with rejection letters from publishers stapled to them. They're all short stories, hopefully I'll be able to read them this week.

It's a weird feeling, knowing that she tried her hand at writing. I've been writing since I was twelve. Never sent anything to a publisher or anything, in fact I've only ever finished one of my writing projects. But I never knew her, and I like that we have an accidental similarity. My sister got her name as her middle name, so I never really felt like I had a tie to her. But now it actually feels like I was related to her, like I had a grandma once, and it never really felt that way before.

The pictures were so great. It was just her, grandma, posing in the front yard or clowning around with her sisters-in-law. Old pictures seem to have so much feeling in them, so many stories. She was pretty adorable, too. I liked seeing the name under her pictures go from "Rosy" to "Mrs. Reeves." My grandpa was obviously enjoying calling her that.

I majorly wish I had access to the TARDIS right now. Everyone talks about how wonderful she was (I know when someone dies you tend to "forget" their faults, but the consensus seems to be that she was top notch), and I just really wish I'd known her. Maybe I'd tell her that sixty-some-odd years later, I finally feel like I got something more from her than just her height.

I think I'm being weird because it's late. I don't even know what I just wrote. Good night.

P.S. In every picture where there was a dog, it was labeled "Pete." My mom remembered there being a dog named Pete, but all the dogs were different breeds. We're really hoping they were 6 different dogs named Pete and that the cousin who came along soon after was named after the dogs xD